Wrong Pipe Character?

Question

Everybody knows the pipe character |, or at least everybody here should know.It popped my mind that in the past I recall it was rendered as a two small pipes / a stretched colon.When I was young I had an MSX, and my memory was right, ascii character 0x7C / 124 looks different. See https://www.msx.org/wiki/images/6/66/MSX_font-Int.pngLooking further, on https://www.ascii-code.com/ ,I can see that 124 / 0x7C is the "vertical bar". And 166 / 0xA6 is "Pipe, Broken vertical bar"It seems we're not using a pipe.. Does anybody happen to know why?

JDW1023 · Accepted Answer

I remembered watching a youtube video[0] about it. The "vertical bar" 124 / 0x7C is in the original 7-bit ASCII standard. But the 166 / 0xA6 "Pipe, Broken vertical bar" is in the not so standard high ASCII/ Extended ASCII [1].[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BktIY7VbrUs [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_ASCII

WillKirkby · Answer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_bar#Solid_vertical_ba...

zzo38computer · Answer

The ASCII character | is a solid bar, although some older fonts, such as the PC font, will have it displayed broken in half. If you are working only in ASCII, they are two representations of the same thing, but if you are working in extended character sets, they are different, and only the solid one is the ASCII one. Many keyboard layouts are ASCII only, and show the broken bar (I suppose this might confuse people who are unaware of it if they are not working with only ASCII, but anyways people have also asked where is the lowercase, before, so both of them can be confused by some people).

ksherlock · Answer

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/3182/why-...

alricb · Answer

Something about old standards and IBM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BktIY7VbrUs

cstuder · Answer

Funny, my keyboard (Microsoft Sculpt) actually has the broken bar printed on the key `7`.Both the ThinkPad P53 keyboard and the Logitech K850 have the solid bar printed on the key.

garaetjjte · Answer

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20627274

sebazzz · Answer

Related why in older C `?!! ?!!` is the same as `||`.

bjourne · Answer

SIGPIPE, &brvbar; Error messages were brief back in the old days.